During the relatively few years of his public poetic career--from the small-press publication of Cages in 1966 to the appearance of Riven Doggeries (1979) as number eighteen in the prestigious America...
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It is a critical commonplace that, in contrast to earlier generations of American poets, no poet born during or after World War II has yet emerged to bridge the gap between "academic" and "experimenta...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
Missing, from ["Notes of Woe"], is the kind of emotional directness found in the title poem of Tate's first collection, "The...
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Critical Essay by William H. Pritchard
James Tate's … [Riven Doggeries] contains few surprises, is thoroughly in the mode of his increasingly extravagant previous work …, and [fro...
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Critical Essay by Mark Rudman
Riven Doggeries is James Tate's most accessible book since his first, The Lost Pilot, but not necessarily his best. Absences still moves me more than anything else...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Dobyns
James Tate's Torches was a complete disappointment, which at first just irritated and then angered me. It seemed as if Tate had gathered up unused images, put t...
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Critical Essay by Victor Howes
The poems [in Viper Jazz by] … James Tate occupy the tenuous borderland between nonsense and disaster. Whether he is spoofing a cosmic ultimatum … or blowi...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Plumly
James Tate is a poet of fine intuitive intelligence. His quick-hit/near-miss use of the poetic punch line has led him into wider imaginative territory and more cul-de-...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Kirkpatrick
[The] poet, and this I think applies to James Tate, can slip into a private world where his unique juxtapositions and fresh imagery are often meaningless to the r...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
Tate's [Riven Doggeries] is disturbingly defensive. The central characteristic of these poems is their impenetrability, at best ordering experien...
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Critical Essay by James Finn Cotter
Nothing at all controls James Tate's choice of metaphors, similes, images, or statements in his new book of poetry. The title poem, "Riven Doggeries,&...
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Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient
Tate has been visible as a poet so long … that one is dismayed to find him still stuck in adolescence [with the poems in Riven Doggeries]. The silliness, defian...
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James (Vincent) Tate
